gʰews-
“to taste, to try”taste, try, choose
Root for tasting, yielding Latin gustare, Greek geuomai, English choose.
Discussion
The PIE noun *h₃éwis (sheep) reconstructs the third member of the pastoral triad — horse, cow, sheep — that defined the PIE economy. The word's survival across multiple branches confirms that sheep-herding was a PIE-level activity, not an innovation of any single daughter culture.
Latin ovis (sheep) continues the form with the regular Italic loss of the initial laryngeal and generates the English derivative ovine (pertaining to sheep). The word ōvīle (sheepfold) is the direct ancestor of the architectural term for a sheep-pen.
English ewe (a female sheep) descends from Old English ēowu, from PGmc *awiz, from PIE *h₃éwis with the expected Germanic treatment. The restriction of ewe to the female of the species is a narrowing that occurred in English; the PIE word covered sheep generally, without gender specification. German Aue (ewe — dialectal) preserves the cognate.
Greek óïs (ὄϊς, "sheep") preserves the form in the Hellenic branch, though the word was less productive in Greek than in Latin, having been partly displaced by prόbaton ("sheep" — literally "that which walks forward," i.e. livestock).
Sanskrit ávi- (sheep) continues the root in Indo-Iranian. The Vedic texts mention sheep in pastoral and sacrificial contexts, and wool (ū́rṇā-, from a related root) was a valued material in Vedic culture.
Old Irish oí (sheep) and Lithuanian avis (sheep) confirm the Celtic and Baltic reflexes. The Lithuanian form is particularly conservative, preserving the PIE word with almost no phonological change — avis in Lithuanian is a near-perfect echo of *h₃éwis in PIE.
The economic significance of sheep in PIE culture extended beyond meat to wool: the PIE speakers almost certainly practised wool-working, as evidenced by the reconstructed vocabulary for spinning (*spenH-), weaving (*teks-), and wool (*h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂-). The sheep was not merely livestock but the raw material for the textile economy that clothed the PIE-speaking world.
Notes
Pokorny 399-400. English gusto, disgust, choose, degust.